Dierdre's Magic
by SoulPieces
Summary: The magic of a town keeps it beautiful, keeps it alive. The magic depends on the leadership. So what happens when that leadership retires and no one takes his place for ten years? Is the town even saveable at that point? Nysa may be the only chance the town has, but how much can a 20-year-old really do?
1. Prologue

**Yep. Here I am with yet another story. It's not like I'm already currently working on five others or anything. No. Of course not.**

**For those wondering, I'm finishing up the semester right now. Friday is my last day of finals, then I'll be free to write more. The Search for Light will have a new chapter before Christmas :)**

**Until then, enjoy my first New Leaf fanfiction. New Leaf brought me back into the Animal Crossing fandom with a rekindled love I hadn't felt since I started the fandom back in '02. So in tribute, here's my first Animal Crossing FanFiction, dedicated to the title that helped me turn over a new leaf in the franchise.**

* * *

PROLOGUE

_The magic of our town thrives on the happiness of the villagers. Positive feelings bring about the blooming flowers and the happy songs of our residents. When a resident becomes unhappy, they leave for another town, so as not to disrupt the magic for the rest of the inhabitants. This courteousness we also owe to the magic that runs deep in the veins of our village._

_Tortimer, our mayor, has kept our village alive and happy for almost a century now. Having taken the position at the ripe young age of 25, Tortimer is well past his retiring years. However, the magic of our town helps keep him going with all the spirit and of a young tortoise. We have long thrived under his mayorship, and at every festival we gave up a prayer to the magic of the town for the longevity of our mayor._

_We all fear that one day he will finally leave us, be it by his choice or by fate's. Our ancestors have all passed happily knowing that their mayor continues on, strong as ever. They leave behind their descendants who worry that it will be during their time that our long-loved mayor will finally resign._

_The worry is mostly a fear of losing a wonderful leader to one that is less-than-qualified. A century teaches a lot of experience, and the magic of the town itself is fabled to have tied in with old Tortimer. Old stories mention that the magic was discovered with his election and remains only as long as he does. We fear that when he leaves, he will take the magic with him._

_As he grows older, his judgment and thoughts get a bit murky. Lately he has been forgetful and dozes off. I fear that one day soon he will leave us. But he refuses to find someone to take his place. "The magic of the town will provide us with a youngster when the time is right," he tells me. "And it will also tell me when I must leave."_

_My worst fear is that he will leave without finding someone new. I trust the magic – I honestly do. But not to that degree. The magic is made by a strong leader, it does not make a strong leader._

The yellow canine sighed and closed the cover of her journal. Lately, it was her only outlet for all her stress. She had so much to deal with, now that the old mayor was becoming feeble-minded. She was expected to take on more responsibilities, since he often forgot his. When her stresses and fears became too much, she wrote down what was on her mind in her journal. Sure, there was a lot of repetitiveness – she had the same fears assault her day after day. But it helped her keep her smile.

"Well, Isabelle, I'm off! Don't spend too long overworking yourself, whippersnapper!" Tortimer's rough voice caught her attention. The old tortoise was making his way slowly to the door, hanging his top hat on the rack by the exit and clutching his walking cane.

"I promise," she replied as cheerily as she could manage.

"Poor girl, works like a dog all the time… heh heh HORF!" His familiar wheezing laugh was all that Isabelle was left with as he shut the door behind him.

She sighed and looked around the town hall. It was a beautiful structure made of gorgeous dark oak wood all around with large picture windows covering three of the walls. The high ceilings made the town hall elegant and spacious, and there was plenty of evidence of its use – paperwork in neat little piles everywhere, well-cared-for potted plants on desks and hanging in the corners, and even a large bookshelf and a globe in the back.

However, the large building had turned into her prison. She never let the mayor know, but she spent long night hours trapped within, going over his paperwork and double checking all the work he had done today. She had gone from being a secretary to being a secondary mayor.

She just didn't have to worry about taking the blame for any decisions made by the town's government.

She sat down in Tortimer's black leather office chair and did her best to make herself comfortable. Thankfully, they hadn't done too much that day, so perhaps she could get home _before_ midnight tonight.

She scooped up a pawful of papers from the stack on his desk and began looking them over. Her eyes flitted from the stack in her hand to what remained on the desk.

What she saw made her heart drop, as well as the papers she had been holding.

She lifted her paws to her cheeks, attempting to hold back her tears. Her worst fears had come true.

"**FINAL RESIGNATION DOCUMENTS.**"


	2. Chapter 1

**Shameless plugging time:**

**Check my profile for links to my FictionPress page, Facebook, and my deviantART page. Also, there's some art links at the bottom of my characters. Art is all by me unless otherwise stated. And of course, fanart is always welcome. I love seeing other people's art :)**

**Feel free to read any of my other fics while you wait on this one to be updated. It'll be a while... *brick'd***

* * *

CHAPTER ONE

"Good-bye mom, I'll miss you!"

The young girl embraced her mother dearly, her thin arms wrapped tightly around her mother's neck beneath her long brunette hair. She had been a brunette once as well, but she'd long since undergone many hairstyle and color changes. At the moment, it was a nice cotton candy pink that stopped between her shoulder blades. She'd pulled it up into a pony tail for today, since she would be on the train for quite a while.

Her mother stepped back and rested her hands on her daughter's shoulders. She towered over her daughter; the height gene had gone straight to their eldest son, leaving nothing for their little girl. She didn't mind much though – being short means she was just that much more unique from the rest of her family!

"Nysa, you'll do great in this new town," her mother said in her smooth soprano. "And I promise to write often!"

At this, young Nysa smiled widely. "I'll look forward to every letter! And I'll be sure to tell you how things are going!"

"Eek, eek! All aboard!" The chimp engineer called over the station's loudspeaker. Animals and humans alike began boarding the east-bound train.

This wasn't an unnatural thing. A couple hundred years ago, a scientific breakthrough created sentient animals that walked, talked, and acted like humans. Of course, there were a few side effects, such as unnatural colorings and patterns, as well as a natural speech feature that caused them to repeat the same word or small phrase after every few sentences.

Despite it all, the new sentient animals began to adjust well to new opportunities they could take with their lives. The scientists offered plenty of programs and such to help the animals adapt. And not long after, humans gladly began to treat them as equals. At first, the animals preferred to live in their own towns with their own communities, but in more recent years, they were happy to integrate humans into their towns or move into the bigger cities to live among the humans.

In fact, Nysa was preparing to move to a previously all-animal town: Dierdre. She'd read so many great books on the old town. It'd been around for many centuries and still held a lot of its quaint charm. So it was the cute little town with a funny name where Nysa decided to make her first home away from her parents and older brother.

"I'd better get going!" Nysa snagged her carry-on bags from the station dock and threw a glance over her shoulder at the gray and green train that was awaiting its passengers. Her other luggage was already on the train.

With one final glance back at her parents, she offered a smile. "Tell Zach I'll miss our crazy adventures, and I want all of you to visit after I've settled in!"

Her dad put an arm around his wife, who was attempting to hold back tears. "Best of luck, little N," he addressed her by the affectionate nickname.

Nysa nodded and darted onto the train. She found her seat relatively easily. Once she was seated, she glanced back at the couple waving to their daughter. She memorized her mother's smiling blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair, the way his stubble decorated his chin in a way that was neither sloppy nor unattractive. In their early 50's, her parents still held on to their youthful good looks. Both were routine joggers, something Nysa had never quite picked up on herself. She had a fast metabolism and figured that exercise was unneeded.

Now she could see tears begin to develop even in her father's dark eyes. Those eyes held so much emotion all the time, and were one of the few things she'd inherited from him.

As the train pulled away from the station, Nysa sighed and turned to face her seatmate. He was a white and blue tom cat with a red and black checkered shirt. The collar was embroidered in gold.

"Hi," the cat said cheerfully. "My name is Rover! What's yours, mya?"

She grinned, glad to see that she had a friendly conversationalist to help pass the time as the train clattered along the tracks. "My name is Nysa! It's weird because it's Greek, but I don't mind. I prefer to be different!"

The cat laughed, a little bit of a meow slipping into it. "Well that's good! If we were all the same, it would be boring!"

The pink-haired girl nodded. "That's why I try to be so different!"

"I don't have to try too hard to be different, mya. I'm pretty much one-of-a-kind!"

"I guess you are, aren't you?" She offered a smile. "So tell me, where are you from?"

Rover shrugged. "I like to ride the rails, I don't really come from any specific place. For a while I settled down in a town called Lavender, but after a while I got an itching to ride the rails again. I haven't traveled this much since about 2002, mya!"

"Well, that's an interesting life!" Nysa nodded. "How do you find the money to do so, if you don't mind me asking?"

He offered up a fanged grin. "I've got some rich relatives who are rather generous."

"You're lucky!" Nysa exclaimed. "My parents have always been alright, but we're not rich enough to allow a relative to just wander the tracks for years."

"Well anyways, where are you headed to?"

She glanced down at her ticket. "It's an old town called Dierdre. I'm the first human to move there!"

The cat's eyes grew wide, looking rather in shock. "Mya… Dierdre? You mean that old town that's said to have 'magic' running through its soil?"

She nodded eagerly. "That's the one! It seems so nice!"

"Oh, mya..I guess it is! I've uh...never heard of it," he stammered. "Sounds nice."

The young woman tilted her head to the side. "Is everything okay?"

He fidgeted. "Oh, uh…mya….yeah! Everything's fine!"

"Eek, eek! We'll be stopping in Mushdom soon! Mushdom Village, next stop!"

Rover's ears poked up at the conductor's voice. "Well hey, looky there, that's my next stop, Mya! It was nice chatting with you, I'd better move to the front of the car!"

As he stood, Nysa caught a glance at his ticket. She couldn't read the town name fast enough, but she knew for sure it did not start with an M.

Regardless, the blue cat quickly left her alone in the booth. She sighed and lean back into the green plush seat, deciding she might be better off conserving her energy for her move. She would, after all, have to pick out a house when she got there. And the town was so old-fashioned that the residents didn't even drive cars, so she would have to travel on foot.

She didn't allow her thoughts to dwell much longer on Rover's strange actions. There were all kinds of people in the world; she didn't have time to dwell on the actions of just one.

* * *

"Eek, eek! Now arriving in Dierdre! Dierdre!" the conductor's voice over the speaker snapped Nysa out of her trance. She gathered her carry-on bags and made her way towards the front of the train. When the doors opened, she came face to face with an irritated-looking brown duck. The duck shoved past her onto the train with a huff, catching her off guard. She stepped off and looked back questioningly towards where the duck disappeared.

"How rude," she mumbled softly.

A monkey dressed in a neat blue suit approached, toting her one luggage bag. "Here you go, miss."

She handed over 200 bells to the chimp. "Thank you so much."

With a tip of his hat, the monkey boarded the train. As the locomotive pulled away, Nysa noticed for the first time how empty the station was. No one else had gotten off the train along with her, and of course no one was expecting her to get off here.

She sighed and picked up her bags. "Well, here I am," she whispered. "Out on my own for the first time."

She took a calming breath and stepped outside of the gate.

The sight that greeted her was entirely foreign and unexpected, to say the least.

The town looked like it had not been inhabited for quite some time. What few trees there were in town were either dead or dying. Weeds grew everywhere, even up through the cracks of the cobblestone patio in front of the station. She couldn't see any buildings at all from where she stood, and the whole place had a very dead feel to it. Even the wind was still.

"This isn't at all what the pictures depicted…" she mumbled disheartedly.

"And who are you?" Came a gruff voice from her left. She spun around and found herself face to face with a large grey kangaroo who didn't look at all happy to see her.

"I-I'm Nysa," she stammered."

He crossed his arms. "Why are you here?"

"I'm moving here…" her voice grew a little smaller out of intimidation. The kangaroo didn't soften at all.

"Why would you want to move _here_?"

"Well…it just looked like such a nice place in all the pictures…"

He guffawed. "This place hasn't looked nice in ten years! Why don't you just hop aboard the next train and get out of here while you still have a little bit of happiness left in you?"

"Walt, leave her alone, can't you see she has no idea what's going on?"

A yellow shih tzu approached the pair, the bell on her hair tie jingling pleasantly as she did so. She wore a yellow jacket with a deep green pencil skirt and didn't look any happier than the grumpy kangaroo.

"All the more reason for her to leave," he mumbled before storming off.

"Though he did raise a good point," the canine said in a slightly softer tone, turning to Nysa. "Why would you want to move here?"

"In all the pictures I saw, it looked so nice…" she responded.

"I'm afraid we haven't had a nice town in ten years. You're wasting your time by moving here. Everyone else is leaving as soon as they have the possibility to."

"But why? What happened?"

The shih tzu shook her head, her little bell tinkling. "It doesn't matter. If you're so adamant about moving here, though, you'll have to go up to main street and visit Mr. Nook from Nook's Homes," she gestured across the tracks where some stone steps cut through the cliffs that bordered the town. "He'll help you settle in. Good day."

"But wait! I didn't get your name…" Nysa tried calling after her, but the dog ignored her and continued walking.

Sighing, Nysa headed across the tracks.

_This isn't exactly what I expected…_


	3. Chapter 2

**Pretty short chapter, and for that I apologize. I've just had a lot to do over this break - a lot more than I anticipated. Plus I'm having issues at home with my mom regarding my hobby for writing (she thinks it's really stupid..) but whatever. I did what I could, and managed to have this meager chapter typed up. I hope it's better than nothing.**

**As always, check my profile for things like fanart, contest information, where else to find me and keep track of my progress between updates, and etc. Thanks and hope you enjoy the chapter.**

* * *

CHAPTER TWO

Nysa was greeted by a Tanuki when she entered the real estate office. It was a fairly nice little building. A few examples of exterior options were displayed in the shop, none of which truly caught her eye.

"Yes, yes, you are the new resident, correct?" The raccoon approached her as she made her way through the door. He wore a green sweater despite the still-warm fall temperatures outside. "I just got a call from Isabelle at the town hall."

"Um, yes, I was told to talk to you about getting a house?" Nysa started cautiously, having already experienced enough hostility after barely making it out of the train station.

"I can't imagine why anyone would want to move here, given the state of our town, hm? That aside, we also currently do not have any vacant houses in town." Seeing the young human girl visibly deflate, he continued quickly. "However, we can go explore the vacant lots in town and you can choose where to build a house. That sounds rather nice, hm?"

"Yeah, that sounds great!" She replied, glad to finally talk to someone who didn't seem absolutely against her very existence.

"Yes, yes, very good. We'll head back into town right away! There are many vacant lots for you to choose for your new home, so take your time! I need the exercise anyways, ho ho!" He grabbed a large pack from beside the door and headed out the door.

Nysa followed the seemingly only halfway-nice resident back into town. It took her a while to find a spot that she felt would make a decent lot, but finally she found a spot in between the town plaza and a cute pink second-hand shop that she had yet to explore. The river wasn't too far south of her new land.

The raccoon quickly set up a fence around her lot, which didn't seem to be too big. But Tom Nook had assured her that once the house was built, she'd have plenty of space. He claimed it was one of the many wonders that the magic of the town provided for its residents.

"This town has magic?" she questioned.

"It _did_, at least," he sighed. "When you take care of a town, it will take care of you. And for so long this town was in good hands. Though I'm afraid about ten years ago we lost those good hands. Now we wonder if there's any magic left, hm."

"That's…tragic," she stated softly.

He suddenly perked up. "But it's nothing to worry about, yes? We must get onto the details of your living here. Now, take this tent…" he withdrew a small leaf from his from his pockets. At Nysa's bewildered expression, he chuckled. "More of the magic of this town. You'll be able to do it in due time, hm? Now, this can be your living quarters until you supply me with a down payment of 10,000 bells!"

She shook her head, still reeling from this "magic" business. "How in the world am I going to do that?"

"Isabelle will explain it all to you if you visit her at the town hall. I must be getting back to the shop, hm? I hope to see you stop by soon!" With a wave, the raccoon in the green suit disappeared in the direction of Main Street.

Nysa looked down at the tiny leaf still in her hand. It looked to be your generic elm tree leaf with a circular bite taken out of it. The longer she looked at it, the more frustrated she became.

"This town is full of crazy people!" she grumbled, plopping down in the dirt. She tossed the leaf off to the side with a huff and pulled her knees to her chest.

With a _poof_ing sound, the leaf she'd thrown suddenly exploded into a tent that filled her entire lot and sent dust flying. She jumped back in shock and looked at the yellow structure that looked as though it'd been set up by a professional camper.

"…What is going on with this town?"

* * *

After a while of exploring the town and meeting the remaining four equally disgruntled neighbors, Nysa headed to the town hall. Though her original reasoning was to follow what Tom Nook had suggested, the more she looked around the town and compared it with the old images she'd seen before, a new plan began to form in her head.

_They just need a little bit of help._

Upon entering the Town Hall, she found it vacant save for Isabelle, who was digging through some papers. Small tears were threatening to leak from the corners of her shining dark eyes, and every once in a while a frustrated whimper found its way from her vocal chords.  
Nysa closed the door softly and approached the front desk. Isabelle looked up and tried her best to hide her negative feelings.

"Hello, welcome to Dierdre's Town Hall. How may I help you?" she offered a pitiful smile.  
"I've found a place for my house," the young girl informed her. "And Mr. Nook told me I could come to you for help on living here. It looks like you're the one who needs help, though…"  
Isabelle shook her head quickly. "Don't worry about me, it's just my job. I get a little stressed sometimes, it's no big deal. What would you like help with?"

"Well, I'd mostly like to know how I'm going to make a living here. I don't suppose there are any job openings?"

Nysa didn't miss Isabelle's quick glance back to the vacant mayor's office. "Well… I'm afraid not," she replied quickly. "However, most residents catch bugs and fish and sell them at Re-Tail to make their money. You'd need a bug net and a fishing rod for that, though…Oh, and the fruit in town goes for 100 bells each, so that's a good way to gather up some money. The sea shells that wash up on the beach go for a small amount as well, though I usually prefer collecting them…"

"Oh, you collect shells too?" Nysa held up her wrist, where a small sea shell bracelet hung loosely. "I use mine to make jewelry."

"Wow…that's really pretty," Isabelle replied softly, gazing longingly at the small piece of jewelry. "I haven't been able to get away lately to collect shells…"

"Oh, how sad…" the young girl said wistfully, thinking upon her large collection back home.

"Oh, it's just part of the job description! No worries. I don't mind too much. It was just a hobby my twin brother and I had when we were younger. I suppose we've long since both outgrown it by now.

"Anyways, if you sell fruit and shells, you should be able to scrape up enough money for some tools. They all cost 500 bells, save for the 400 bell axe. Shovels are good for finding fossils, which are pretty pricey, and for planting more fruit trees."

Nysa nodded as Isabelle spoke. "Where can I buy them from?"

"Well, sometimes the Nooklings on Main Street have some in stock. If they don't, though, you're more than welcome to come back here and I'll sell you a bug net or a fishing rod."

"And I just have one last question, Isabelle."

"Well you're free to ask it and I'll do my best to give you a thorough answer."

"What can I do to help this town?"

Again, the dog's eyes flitted to the empty office behind her, but she shook her head. "I'm afraid there's nothing. Just try to live your life and be as happy as you can be until you can find a town in better shape."

Nysa leaned over the counter. "I'm not going to do that, Isabelle. I saw what this town once was and I want to help restore it. Even your residents aren't happy. I want to help you out. Please Isabelle, tell me what I can do to help! There has to be something…"

"…How old are you?" Isabelle finally sighed after a few moments of terse silence.

"I'm 20."

"…You're very young. But…I guess this town needs a fresh mind to help out.

"Nysa…will you please take office as our Mayor?"

Nysa grinned. "I thought I'd have to beg it from you, Isabelle."


End file.
